Urgent Care - Criteria For Urgent Care Centers

Criteria For Urgent Care Centers

The Urgent Care Association of America established criteria for urgent care centers in April 2009 - The Certified Urgent Care Center designation. These criteria define scope of service, hours of operation, and staffing requirements. A qualifying facility must accept walk-in patients of all ages during all hours of operation. It should treat a "broad-spectrum" of illnesses and injuries, and have the ability to perform minor procedures. An urgent care center must also have on-site diagnostic services, including Phlebotomy and x-ray.

Urgent care centers are distinguished from other similar types of ambulatory healthcare centers, such as emergency departments, and walk-in primary care centers by the scope of illness treated and facilities available on-site. In 2000, medical treatment centers opened in retail stores with an on-site pharmacy. These centers are generally staffed with nurse practitioners or physician assistants. These retail clinics are not true urgent care centers because of the limited level of care that can be provided without a physician or proper equipment on site.

Read more about this topic:  Urgent Care

Famous quotes containing the words criteria, urgent, care and/or centers:

    There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.
    —H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)

    The urgent consideration of the public safety may undoubtedly authorise the violation of every positive law. How far that or any other consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice, is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant.
    Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)

    I care not by what measure you end the war. If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America, whatever may be your object, depend upon it, as true as effect follows cause, that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers, and poison the fair fruits of freedom. Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.
    Ernestine L. Rose (1810–1892)

    But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.
    Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)